Evidence-Based Design

I return from ION 2008 and a whirlwind tour of northwest Oregon and southeast Washington. We drove from Seattle to Portland to Salem to the coast and up 101 until somewhere in Washington before returning to Seattle via Olympia … in two days.

The conference itself was pretty good. Executive heavy.

Rather than talks, I mostly went to panels on topics that I already knew well, which made them into interesting exercises of seeing who knew what they were talking about. Sadly, I missed the couple of real talks that I was interested in.

My talk, Design for Longevity, was a little under the radar — I think I should have gone with the original title, “Your Tools Suck.” Because that’s what it’s about: you can get more done with fewer people and less money if you think about workflow up front. But most designers and tools programmers and middleware providers never thought about it too hard, so it takes us forever to make content, and then we lose subscribers the longer we go without updates. Obvious stuff, but people keep making the same mistakes. Here are the slides. I cleaned up the notes so that it could feel more like you were there.

There may be better ways to approach solutions to these problems, but I pointed out the ones that have worked for me — tools that I can build on my own with (comparatively) limited technical skills. And remember that it’s from the perspective of a small-team balance designer, which is what I was doing Back In The Day.

(Aside: I would like to point out that, while presenter view is a great idea, it really sucks that you can’t practice it until you’re hooked up to two monitors. When you create the bulk of your slides on a plane and in a hotel room, you only have one monitor. And hey, would you know it, but clicking on different parts of the screen in presentation mode appears to do different things, but of course you couldn’t know it, because you couldn’t try it! They are apparently taking cues from World of Warcraft raid encounter design … once again, a failure in workflow foresight.)

I’ve been pretty busy recently. I moved into a new house, and I’m still busy unpacking and hitting up the local home improvement stores for new plants for the front porch. This is interesting, because I don’t know anything about plants.

My guild in World of Warcraft finally entered tier 6 content, as reported by Brandon. Even though we’ve been attuned for weeks, we made our first solid attempt at Black Temple just last night, and it was the most fun raiding I’ve had for quite a while. (Was it a conscious design decision to have all of these BT bosses’ AE attacks not have a visible effect icon? Because I tend to think “hey, am I standing in the fire?” and then I look up at my effects list to confirm it, and if I don’t see something, I assume I’m not. Additionally, when there’s an effect, boss mods can use it as a trigger and play a GET OUT OF THE FIRE, MORON sound for you. I guess that we’re playing with the big kids now, and the big kids don’t need any pesky UI to play the game for them.)

It’s GDC time. I’m not going, but my company has a presence this year. If you’re a publisher and would like to spend some money, please visit our booth this week. Even if you’re not, please watch our first gameplay video.

And finally, I’m proud to announce that I’ll be giving a talk at the ION Game Conference in Seattle later this year. It’s called “Design for Longevity,” and it’s about designing infrastructure systems and tools that will make your live team not want to kill themselves five years from now.